The prior art provides various holders for mounting dental X-ray film, photographic slides or photographs. Thus Gould et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,279,112 and Sakamoto U.S. Pat. No. 3,543,426 describe film holders which require that the film be mounted in the holders by sliding the film into the latter so that holding tabs override the upper surface of the film as it slides into the holding window. Lieberman U.S. Pat. No. 3,069,795 and Sharp U.S. Pat. No. 3,921,322 provide film mounts having broad holding flanges, and the loading of film into display windows requires that the film be flexed substantially in order to permit engagement of the film behind the holding flanges. Film mounts described by Greene et al. U.S. Pat. No. 2,842,882 are so designed that loading of film requires deformation of the mounts so as to free up holding tabs which serve to hold the film in place on the mounts along all four edges of the film. Bosworth U.S. Pat. No. 1,853,197 describes a film mount that necessitates stapling each piece of film to the mount after the engagement of one edge of the film under a holding tab. Winslow U.S. Pat. No. 2,614,354 describes a picture mount which requires the use of two holding plates which serve to maintain a picture held between them in a sandwich fashion. Gwin U.S. Pat. No. 3,195,258 provides a holder which engages photographic slides by the lateral displacement of flexible ribs. The holder is chiefly adaptable to holding photographic slides, and on return of the ribs to their normal unflexed position after loading of a film slide, would tend to distort any unstiffened film material such as dental X-rays.
Thus the film holders provided by the prior art either require an undesirable manipulation of either the film mounts themselves or the film, or it provides picture holding concepts which are entirely unsuited to the mounting and display of X-ray film.
The film mounts provided by the present invention avoid the problems indicated above encountered by the prior art mounts in that the loading of the mounts with X-ray film eliminates entirely manipulation of the mounts themselves and minimizes manipulation of the film to be mounted. In accordance with the present invention, the X-ray film are simply snapped into the mounts by the application of gentle finger pressure, an operation which involves only very slight flexure of the film. In addition the mounts provided by the instant invention provide a larger display window for maximum viewing exposure of the X-ray film.